"Smart" radios have the potential to support much more efficient and productive use of spectrum, but spectrum regulation is a political issue with well established stakeholders. What's more, our limited experiments with commons-based spectrum management have had widely differing results: WiFi, enormous success; UltraWideBand, disappointment.
WiFi's success happened in "junk" spectral bands where established players weren't interested. That will be difficult to repeat, but Brough will describe some very simple physical principals of radio propagation which, when combined with the next five years of Moore's law progress in semiconductors, suggest a path forward that's very different from TV white spaces. Indeed, the most important result of regulatory decisions on UltraWideBand and TV white spaces is they validate the concept of secondary access.